This Dastardly Email Outreach Program Put Us in the Top 25th Percentile of All Marketers
Here’s How to Beat Us at Our Own Game.
Jason Quey
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With the right email, you can make all kinds of magic happen for your business.
An email address is the lifeblood of a sustainable internet business. Perhaps you’ve heard that email marketing has an average ROI of $44 for every $1 spent (or £38 for each £1 spent). Yes, email marketing is not the same as email outreach. But since email marketing is effective, wouldn’t it make sense that email outreach can be just as powerful?
Outreach has helped me get interviewed on Inc, Entrepreneur, and Huffington Post. I used it for Orbit Media’s survey on blogging statistics, which has over 430 links (and counting). And email outreach helped me get my first 11 customers for my startup.
Most shy away from cold emails because they think it feels spammy. It doesn’t help that the median reply rate is so low, at a mere 12%, according to BuzzStream. But, the upper 5th percentile is able to get reply rates of 40% or higher.
Quick tip from Kate Harvey at Chargify - If you are sick of receiving bad pitches, send them a link to this guide. Your good deed will save all of our inboxes.
Throughout this guide, I will share what I’ve used to get reply rates of 20-40% on 80% of my campaigns, so you can get more traffic, links, and sales. Now, perhaps you are thinking about all the outreach emails you get and think the reply rate is insanely high.
Perhaps borderline impossible. Since I know the skeptics reading this want proof, here’s a dashboard of past campaigns:
This shows a mix of low and high volume campaigns, completely cold outreach to warm relationships, and a range of recognized brands.
Yes, these factors will play a role in your outreach results. A great brand with loyal fans will have higher reply rates than a no-name brand (I’ve seen 20%+ reply rates in under 24 hours with one outreach campaign). But even using no-name brands, I've had reply rates between 20-40%.
What I will show you in this guide are the key principles to get someone to reply back to you. Once you have a reply, then you can begin to build a relationship, which may lead to different opportunities than you first expected.
The interview on Inc was originally a pitch for a men’s style blog. Although Ms. Thibodeaux enjoyed my article, it wasn’t until 3-4 emails later that she mentioned her struggle of writing consistently on her blog. This gave me the opportunity to pitch an interview on blogging productivity tips, which she ended up using for the Inc article.
These principles work for any kind of outreach, whether you do it on Slack, on social media, or social events. The Entrepreneur interview came through a Slack pitch, and the Huffington Post interview was a pitch using Skype. I prefer email because it feels personal, it’s easy to scale, and often easier to keep tabs on every interaction.
But once you learn the principles of outreach, you can apply it in many mediums and channels.
Here’s what I will cover in this guide:
Let’s start off by defining your goals and objectives.
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